


The Deep

by Arukou



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 17:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17027046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou/pseuds/Arukou
Summary: He's down in hell, but he keeps imagining angels' voices.





	The Deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MusicalLuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicalLuna/gifts).



> I could have sworn I posted this, but I can't find it in my "works" list. If I have posted it, could someone tell me, please? Originally posted [Here](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/post/171331058731/for-musicalluna-because-its-her-birthday-happy) on Tumblr.

Everything is thick and rubbery and he feels like he’s choking on his tongue in his own mouth. No. Not his tongue. There’s something there, down his throat. He gags, gags again, and then everything is heavy. Far, far away he hears voices, but he just can’t quite grasp them. The thing is moving and he gags again and again until its gone, but the air is like ice and sandpaper as he sucks it down. The distant voices are closer, but then they’re farther again. So far away.

For a long time, he’s in a dark place. The ice wasn’t like this. Blessedly, the ice made him sleep, shut down his brain. Now, though, he’s awake, conscious enough to know that he’s unconscious, like being on the edge of a lucid dream. He can’t remember anything at all, and everything is so heavy on him, crushing him down deeper. He thinks there was something he was supposed to do, somewhere he was supposed to be. A flash of red in his vision and then gone again. He can never tell if its real or if its something like those floaters he sees when he closes his eyes at night but just can’t seem to get to sleep. He wants to sleep so badly.

Time in the dark place has no meaning. He has been here for a single second and also for an eternity, in the space between his own heartbeats. He wonders if he’ll go mad, and if he does, will anyone know? Is this death? He’d been hoping for something else, something more. His mom. Peggy. The Commandos. All the people he’s loved and lost. He doesn’t want this endless black.

At some point, some point that is both near and distant, he registers a voice. Like the other voices, it’s distant as a dying star, but if he focuses enough, thinks enough, he begins to sense the shape of the words. “–and you just, you just nodded. You took her word for it, didn’t even ask a question. Even though I’d just shot up half the helicarrier, you still just trusted me. I never told you how much that meant to me. So thanks. For that.” The space between words becomes so distant he wonders if he didn’t imagine the voice in the first place. But then, “Fuck, Steve, please.” And then silence.

In the time it takes for nebula to form stars, another voice arrives. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell–” There had been all sorts of oozy smells. He thinks. He can’t remember what it’s like to smell anymore. This voice is different from the last one, softer, quieter, more frightened, he thinks. On and on the tale goes and it’s soothing. For a while, Steve can forget the heavy nothingness which presses in all around him. At some point, the voice fades away, and he is again left in a vast hole of nothing and he wishes it would end.

His next hallucination sings, deep and rumbling like tanks in the mountains, or the mountains themselves. He doesn’t understand the language at all, but it lilts long and haunting, echoing through the eternal dark reaches he’s trapped in. He thinks, maybe, it’s like fire. For the briefest moment he is warm, his limbs tingle, he thinks he might remember what strawberries taste like. But then the song fades away, and with it, he fades back down into nothingness.

There is weight on him, qualitatively different than the other weight, though he couldn’t describe how. It is gossamer light, like spiders’ webs, the faintest hint of strength and delicacy. It travels over him one brush at a time, and at last, there is a voice as well. He is going mad, he’s sure. “You and I are different people. But they’re telling me they want me to be you. Lead in the field. Don’t make me be you, Steve. We need you.” Singing, and this time he thinks maybe he knows the language, knows the frigid lilt of it, the rough timbre of the voice beneath. For a moment, he thinks he sees a flash of light. Why can’t he go there? Why can’t he leave this place?

An eternity later, a star collapses and a black hole forms and he hallucinates another person. “I fixed your armor. Shouldn’t be so easy to burn now. And I changed the material. It can take a lot more: bullets, monster jaws, Hulk on a good day. It’ll be good, you’ll like it. Clint’s got some new arrows, too, although I don’t think they’re flying as straight as they need to. Gotta work out the–” On the voice goes, a rapid tattoo, like a drumbeat in the distance. All his other hallucinations have been vague, short. This one is full of specificity, but of a quality he can’t begin to grasp, mathematical constructs and chemical formulas which slip through his fingers like sand. He tries to catch them, but they disappear like cats in the night.

Something changes, though. This new voice stays. And stays. And stays. And the other voices return as well, filling his ears with a faintly muffled cacophony. Mostly he can’t make out what’s said between them, but then, between solar winds, he catches it. “Take him off life support? Are you kidding? What the hell are you smoking, Fury?”

“I’m being pragmatic. It’s been months. If Cap was gonna come back, he’d be back by now.”

“He’s not gone. He’s right here. Look at him.”

“I am. He’s a vegetable.”

“We have definitive proof he’s not. His brain activity is like nothing we’ve ever seen. It’s always like he’s awake. You can’t just pull the plug on that.”

“Well then what do you propose? We just leave him here to gather cobwebs for another eighty years?”

“We trust him. That’s what we do. We trust him to come back to us.”

“Have you read the will?”

“Yes! Ye–”

“We’ve read the will. We say he wrote it when he was depressed as hell and it’s not valid. It hasn’t been redone in two years, and things have changed. He’s changed. We’ve changed. Don’t hold him to that bull crap."

The fierceness of their demands is like something out of a picture, the rattling sound of a projector and the heroic brass band in the background. He can see them all, facing down this one man, this one man who wants to end it. Steve wants it to end. But he doesn’t want to let down his stupid hallucinations either. Not after he went to the trouble of imagining them. They all seem so real, so vital, so loyal. In the distance, he sees it again. A flash of red. He does what he’s never been able to do before; he raises a hand and reaches.

The red is Peggy’s lipstick, the flash of Bucky’s gun's muzzle, the blood of soldiers on the snow, Clint’s heart-patterned boxers, Bruce’s favorite tea, Thor’s cape, Nat’s hair, Tony’s armor. He reaches for it all and watches as that faint pinprick expands from a sand grain to a pea to a dime to an orange to a dinner plate to a beach ball to a globe to a sun, fills him with red, with warmth, even as his heavy limbs sink down down down.

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“His fingers. His fingers are moving.”

Silence. A breath inhaled and held, not yet exhaled.

“Steve?” So tiny, so tentative. He wants to give them their fierceness back. He opens his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> You can maybe possibly find me on [Tumblr](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/) if I haven't been purged.


End file.
